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[SPOILERS] Babylon 5 and Women
As a sequel to my earlier posts about why I love Babylon 5 and why as a queer person I love Babylon 5 (minor spoiler warnings on both of those, if you've forgotten/are just joining us,) today I want to talk about why as a woman I love Babylon 5. Hooray!

The quick summary: Babylon 5 doesn't have as many women as it really should, but the ones it has are fan-fucking-tabulerrific. Also it does an unusually good job of avoiding many common tropes about women's roles and interactions with others.

The breakdown:

By the numbers:

-Percentage of the main cast (by credits) that is female, by season:

• Season 1: ≈ 37% (4/11)
• Season 2: unchanged
• Season 3: ≈ 23% (3/13)
• Season 4: unchanged
• Season 5: 25% (3/12)
• Average: ≈ 29%

(Information about characters whose status I judged questionable, and what I did about them: Did not count Kosh. Zack and Corwin I arbitrarily declared to be main cast from S3 onward, though it could be argued that they are minor until later, and I didn't count Keffer even though he appeared in the opening credits for a while, nor did I count Morden.)

Qualitative analysis of the above numbers:

Specific female characters: GOOD.

Our specific women are:

-Delenn: Ambassador, philosopher, scrappy fighter, love interest. As a government official, she is responsible for both starting and ending the Earth-Minbari war. Subsequently she dissolves the Minbari government, reconstitutes it, and sets up the UN in space. She also is damn' menacing in a spaceship (and can fight in one, too) and has been known to break men's fingers for sexually harassing her. She can monologue like nobody else on the show, and the show is full to bursting of monologuing. As far as her relationship with Sheridan goes, she's the initiator most of the time (both their first date and their first time having sex are initiated by her, though he is the one who officially proposes marriage after it's only been obvious that they were going to get married for a couple of seasons) and has a tendency to rescue him from various perilous situations. He's a lot more dependent on her than she is on him during the series, though once he dies she apparently stops doing anything useful. Delenn is deemed "supercool."

-Na'Toth: G'Kar's aide, exists for only two seasons. Her first, and really only, major appearance she has to thwart an assassin who wants to torture G'Kar to death, to which end she beats the crap out of, in turn, G'Kar and then the assassin. She's tough, nasty, and basically consistent with our understanding of her species at the time. I find no material difference between her and her male counterparts who serve under the other ambassadors, except the whole disappearing bit, which I don't think has anything to do with her gender specifically. Na'Toth is deemed "high-potential moderate cool."

-Talia Winters: Probably the most sexualized woman on the show, as a "curves in all the right places" blond who wears fierce makeup, high heels and very flattering dresses. Semi-stalked by Mr. Garibaldi for a while in a creepy way for the first season, but he stopped when she tried to help him find his One True Love (who is a pile of WTF I may have to address later) and they formed a kind of friendship. Talia is obviously self-sufficient and would have been the super-telepath and telekinetic character had the actress not quit, but since she did the character is relatively undeveloped. I've covered her bisexuality (it's not the "just experimenting" type!) in my previous post about LGBT issues. Talia is deemed "seriously high-potential moderate cool with a side of unfortunate."

-Lyta Alexander: Took over for Talia (who had previously taken over for her.) Lyta is a super-telepath and telekinetic, though it takes her a while to figure out how super; she was modified by the Vorlons, with which she has an unhealthy obsession, to function as a weapon, but never actually did so. Her apparent low confidence in her first couple of seasons and weird connection to Kosh make her relatively uninteresting in my view, until she joins the movement to get telepaths a separate homeworld away from Earth's draconian restrictions, falls in love with said movement's leader, and figures out that she's got ridiculous powers. Then she becomes scary-awesome. Points are taken off of Lyta for her main development being a male love interest's influence, but tons more are put on because she's scary-awesome. Lyta is deemed, you guessed it, "scary-awesome."

-Susan Ivanova: Goes between being "one of the guys" complete with masculine dress and mannerisms and appearing the model of femininity -- and back -- routinely. Kicks butt in negotiations and physical combats alike. Has a Tragic Past and a Dark Secret, which make her screwed-up in the extreme. She is not defined by her relationships with men -- the only relationship that I would say defines her in any depth is with her mother. About the only thing about Ivanova I don't think would ever occur with a guy is the fluid switch between "butch" and "femme" personas depending on the context (though Captain Kirk could've pulled it off, maybe.) Ivanova is deemed "God."

-Elizabeth Lochley: Replaced Ivanova in the final season. Lochley is another tough-as-nails independent female character, different in numerous ways from Ivanova but sharing much of what makes her cool. Lochley does tricep dips the hard way, okay, that's how tough she is. Can monologue up a storm, too. Lochley's late appearance, however, means that she got relatively little time to grow. She is deemed "high-potential cool."

Minor characters deserving mention:

-"Number One" is the head of the Mars rebels and a love interest of sorts for Franklin, another tough, dangerous, militaristic type. She completely dominates all interactions with Franklin, most significantly by asking him out after determining that he's not a spy who should be executed. Number One is deemed "should-have-had-a-spinoff-series cool."

-Lise Hampton-Edgars-Garibaldi is Garibaldi's One True Love, who marries someone else after he leaves her, has a baby, ends up losing custody when they divorce and the guy rips her off, remarries to an old rich guy she insists she loves despite supposedly still having feelings for Garibaldi and knowing that he wants another chance, and when that guy dies promptly falls into Garibaldi's arms. She's a train wreck, though not quite as much of one as Garibaldi is for marrying her after that. Seriously, what the hell? Apparently being attractive to Garibaldi is a major point against one's ability to be a quality character (see also: Talia Winters.) Lise is deemed "WTF."

General: GOOD/HIGH-POTENTIAL.

There are a few patterns in B5 meriting special recognition:

-Women in B5verse are not defined, in general, by men: their relationship status is not related to their importance, nor are they less likely to be developed or feature in important scenes than men are (ignoring the disproportionate numbers.)

-Women in B5verse tend to be initiators and/or portrayed as in charge or on equal footing in romantic/sexual relationships, more often than one would expect. I mentioned a few cases of women initiating relationships above, but to this I'd like to add that in all of the sex scenes I can recall, the woman is always on top. More generally, the implicit value system about relationships (based on discussions thereof, and the few portrayals we have) seems to be egalitarian.

-There are multiple cases of men having crushes on, or in fact being in love with, women who do not reciprocate or appear not to care about their feelings. The basic pattern with these guys is that they ultimately (or immediately) accept their rejection; "no" means "no" in B5verse, unlike certain other sci-fi franchises I could name *coughStarWarscough*, and silence means nothing whatsoever. There are a couple of cases where the men in question end up behaving badly out of jealousy (Lennier, minorly Zack) and Marcus dies nobly for his love, but there's no implication that the women are responsible for this. It's kind of scary that this is abnormal, but it feels like it is.

-Numerically, in the background things are grim. There is apparently one female Narn in existence, and two female Minbari; the Centauri women exist, but the Centauri society appears to be the sort of patriarchy where women are officially property; the Earth military has hardly any women, but has more than the Earth government does. I think the idea of a lot of women on a military-themed show probably seemed odd, but this one's set in the 23rd century!

-The Psi Corps (bad guys, mind) has a breeding program which apparently uses forced impregnation (sexual reproduction or AI, I don't know) to produce their genetically engineered superior telepaths. Does this imply anything about the status of reproductive choice in the B5 universe as a whole? I don't know.

Now here's where my elegant formatting only works if I cut something I don't want to or put in a filler line like this. Stand by....

To sum up, then, I judge B5 worthy. It had strong female characters and some very feminist assumptions and attitudes built into the worldbuilding, but suffered from severe numerical imbalance, probably due to subconscious factors (male being the "default") and social conventions (military-themed shows have a male majority.) I still rank it high on effort, and award bonus points for competence -- JMS avoided a lot of the main mistakes men and far too often women make when writing female characters, and wrote his female characters as people first.